He tips a brow and nods to the monkey still wrapped around my torso.
“This is my son, Jonas.”
Jonas keeps his arms around my waist but tucks to my side, facing Noah. “I’m lord of the manor,” he states. My new manager wears an expression of shock. I’m reminded of Isaiah, who stared in disbelief when I told him I was pregnant and then demanded I end the pregnancy.
You know I don’t want children.
I did know this about Isaiah. I’d even preached a word or two myself against rugrats before I was thirty. But grief does strange things, like pushing a woman into sleeping with the charming inn manager and resident artist days after her father’s funeral, thus beginning a wild affair with a narcissistic older man. At Isaiah’s ripe age of forty, he was still virile enough to plant a seed when I was thirty-two, and once I knew my little bud was growing, I wasn’t giving him up.
I gave up Isaiah instead.
Or rather, he gave us up.
“Hey…pal.” Noah stumbles to greet my son and holds out his fist for a bump. “How old are you?”
“Five and three-quarters,” Jonas proudly announces.
“I have twin nephews a few years older than you.” Noah’s gaze remains on Jonas another second. When his eyes finally lift for me, they’ve narrow into silver slits. “You didn’t mention you were a mother.”
“It wasn’t relevant to your position.”
Noah remains fixated on me. “Are you married?” He chokes while he glances at my left hand which is bare of a ring.
“No.” No, I am absolutely not married. Holding my head higher, I address him. “I’m a single mother.”
Single parents do not get enough credit for being who they are and doing what they do on their own. My father had been a single parent. He would have raised Jonas alongside me and been an excellent example of a gentleman if he hadn’t passed before I’d gotten pregnant. Uncle Joe was a stand-in grandfather, which was why it hurt so much that he wanted to sell the inn.
And I didn’t need to explain myself to the judgmental man before me.
“Go fold some towels. It’s lunchtime for me.” I squeeze Jonas at my side and glance down at him, ruffling his hair. “And I have a date.”
+ +
“Uncle Joe, I just need a little more time.”
The bank officer is dragging his feet responding to my loan application, and panic is slowly setting in. My past work history has been a bit of a mess. Dad would call it creative spontaneity. Uncle Joe called me flighty.
Either way, I regret my lack of financial credit and stable employment. It wasn’t until I was nearly thirty-two and returned to Bluebird Hollow Inn that I settled into a steady routine.
“Tessa, we’ve been over this. I’m old. I want to retire.” Through the phone, I hear the ripple of a breeze through palm trees.
“You aren’t old. And the inn is a part of you as much as it was Dad.”
“Bluebird Hollow was your father’s passion, not mine.”
My father oversaw running the inn more than his younger brother, but the property still belonged to both men equally. When Dad died, I inherited his half, but after over a decade away from the inn, I’d been lost at first. When Isaiah was present, Joe turned over more and more of the inn management responsibilites to our resident artist in a trade-off of services. The freedom allowed Joe to become a snowbird, spending the winter months in Florida and the touristy summer months in our small lakeside town in Michigan. As my uncle nears sixty, he wants to be done with the inn. His heart hasn’t been into Bluebird Hollow for years.
This summer, he doesn’t want to return north.
And I’m two months out from Joe’s birthday, which happens to be the day he wants to put Bluebird Hollow on the market.
I don’t ask my uncle the question that keeps me awake at night. What will I do if I can’t buy him out? Of course, Joe wants to sell because the profit will be higher for him. If I buy him out, it’s only one-half the appraised value of the property and buildings. A clause about the sale of Bluebird Hollow Inn in their incorporation papers was my safety net. If both parties didn’t agree to sell, the document stipulated that one could buy out the other half of ownership at the fair and reasonable appraised value versus the real estate market value, which can be nearly triple an appraisal.
“Maybe you could retire after the summer season is over.” From May to September, the coastline is busy with weekend visitors and summer-only residents. And it’s the busiest time of the year for the inn. With Noah as only a temporary manager, I could use Joe’s help. I have a lot of questions for my uncle like why we aren’t using the old salon in the lower level of the inn and how did our financials get so bad.
Noah was quite the upper management of his fancy hotel in Chicago, having access to information I don’t recall being privy to as the innkeeper here, and he’s done some digging. Then again, Isaiah had access to too many intricacies of this business while I did most of the actual work around the place.
He said he’d fix a toilet, but I’d be the one to use a YouTube video and rusty tools to repair it.
He said we should offer breakfast treats along with complimentary coffee each morning, but I organized delivery of baked goods from Autumn at Crossroads Café.
He said the only way I’d be a better artist was to devote myself to my craft, but I was too busy working the inn while he diddled with his art.
“May fourth, Tessa. I turn sixty years old, and I’ll be celebrating that milestone here in Florida. I don’t want to return to the inn. I don’t want Bluebird Hollow.”
I wish I could ask him to just give me his half or allow me a payment plan on his share, but Joe doesn’t trust me, and he wants his portion in one lump sum to live off in the orange state.
“May fourth,” I mumble to my uncle.
We say goodbye, and I cover my face with my hands.
May fourth. The force may not be with me by then.
5
[Noah]
She’d stunned me.
I hadn’t a clue she was a mother, and while it shouldn’t matter—it didn’t matter—I was still perplexed. Something like this was usually on my radar. I didn’t do sad or desperate or needy. Not that single mothers, in general, are this way. Not that Tessa is any of those things, but I remember my own mother when she became a single parent, falling into a funk so deep she’d lost weight but not her faith in my father. Blind, unwavering faith. She preached about endless love and deep devotion despite what he’d done to her, to us as a family. Even when he hit her that one time—only once—and proclaimed it would never happen again, she was adamant he loved her, and she loved him. There was never another wicked slap, but that first strike was one too many and enough to rock me to my core.
They’d been arguing about money. Money he didn’t have and blamed her for wanting. She claimed their love was enough.
But it wasn’t.
He always wanted more. And all the desire for more only led to a lot less.